Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic

Thanks to all my travel recently, and some unexpected free time, I've been doing a lot of reading lately. I set my reading goal at the beginning of this year at 24 books - I've already read 20. So I decided to double my reading goal to 48:

I'm now technically "behind schedule" but I'll be doing a lot of reading in the next week (more travel), so I'm sure I'll catch back up. I also cleaned out my bookshelves recently, putting books I'm unlikely to read/reread anytime soon into storage, and created two new shelves for myself: my to-read books, one shelf devoted to fiction and the other to non-fiction. As I read through these two shelves, I'll swap those books out for books in storage and/or new books.

Camp NaNoWriMo is a virtual writer’s retreat, designed for maximum flexibility and creativity. We have Camp sessions in both April and July, and we welcome word-count goals between 30 and 1,000,000. In addition, writers can tackle any project they’d like, including new novel drafts, revision, poetry, scripts, and short stories.

Basically, unlike NaNoWriMo, where the goal is to write 50,000 words toward a novel, Camp NaNoWriMo lets you pick any kind of project you want, not just a novel, and you can customize your writing goals. In fact, because the project type is flexible, you have some flexibility on what sort of metric you want to use - like a page-count instead of word-count.

I've decided to work on a project I've been thinking about since Blogging A to Z in April: a book on statistics. I'm still undecided on whether it will be a textbook or something a bit more mainstream. I think I'll take advantage of the flexibility of Camp NaNoWriMo and just start writing to see where it goes. I have a list of topics, which I plan to flesh out into a chapter outline in the next few days, and I'll drawing heavily from posts I've already written.